Levels.fyi Used WHAT for their backend?

It wasn't SQL or NoSQL

✏️ tldr;

Levels.fyi is a website where users can see anonymous and publicly sourced salary information.

The website used Google Sheets as their backend in the beginning but eventually needed to scale to use an actual server.

They did this by duplicating database queries to a real backend server before migrating completely.

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Initial Levels.fyi Infrastructure

When Levels.fyi was being built, they wanted to move quickly without a backend. To save time, they used Google Sheets as their backend to read, write, and parse their salary data on JSON files (you read that correctly).

In between was using Amazon Lambda functions, a server less framework to call their API's. This outsourced any infrastructure management to Amazon and Google.